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Jun 30, 2013

Ann Coulter--beautiful but deadly--one woman republican demolition crew.................................................Chris Christie is probably breathing a sigh of relief as ann coulter exits stage right from his group of supporters--with tweets like this she is paving the way for him to run--Clinton and Christie--now that's going to be an exciting race. Keep up the good work, ann, look around and notice who is voting . Dawn of the Dead--ann coulter and the republican party.

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter has lost her enthusiasm for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie after the senator he appointed to temporarily fill the late Frank Lautenberg's seat voted to end debate on the immigration bill.

"@GovChristie's dead to me," Coulter said in a tweet to the Republican she once championed as the party's only hope to capture the White House in 2012.

"So glad you FINALLY woke up to the fraud that is @ChrisChristie," she said in another, followed by, "if amnesty passes, country is over. THANKS CHRIS CHRISTIE."

Coulter was one of the earliest advocates of a Christie presidential candidacy and pushed hard for him to run against President Barack Obama in the last election.

"I don't care if [Chris Christie] wants to run, his country needs him, it appears," she saidin February 2011.

As late as May, Coulter defended Christie against criticism that he was fraternizing with Obama, telling conservative talk show host Sean Hannity, "There seems to be a concerted movement by both liberals and conservatives to lie about Christie and make him seem more liberal than he really is."

Coulter appears to have thrown her support behind Sen. Ted Cruz as the 2016 GOP presidential nominee. "CRUZ 2016!" she said at the end of her tweet.

appearing in Yahoo News today...........

Why I would rather live in Gaza than Egypt, my birthplace

The hell of Gaza is better that the paradise of Egypt: This could be hard to believe since Gaza has a reputation of being unsafe, but this is the conclusion I have reached after searching for a safer place to live with my wife and baby boy.

How could this be? Just two years ago, Egypt appeared to some to be on the cusp of an exciting democratic revolution, which would bring more power to the people and give them the freedom Arabs across the Middle East have been yearning for after half a century of Western-backed dictators.

Instead, on my nine visits since then, I have found the country so changed for the worse that I would rather live in a tiny coastal territory with no sovereignty, unemployment rates of more than 30 percent, and a government punished by Israel and the West, both of which consider the ruling Hamas movement to be a terrorist organization.

To be sure, I have faced frequent violence between Israel and Gaza militants, as well as hazards in my career as a journalist – especially during military conflicts with Israel, such as the 2008-09 war and the 2012 Pillar of Defense operation.

And I thought I had found a way out.

In 2012, I got Egyptian citizenship, since I was born to an Egyptian mother and a Palestinian father. This, together with my desire for safety and stability, was a strong motive for me to move back to Egypt, where I was born and spent 14 years of my childhood, and where three sisters and my mother's family live.

I received more than half a dozen job offers from media outlets, and also had promising plans to start an education center to teach students English, math, science, and other subjects.

The salaries were not as high as what I receive in Gaza, but since I was looking for safety and stability, I did not care much about money. Things were rosy in my eyes, although many of my relatives and friends in Gaza criticized my decision because the economic and security situation in Egypt was not that good.

I did not believe them until last month.

I traveled to Egypt together with a coworker to receive a media course for TV journalists, which also drew journalists from Yemen, Libya, Iran, and China.

On the second of day of the course, we had a field training, in which we were to film a feature story about how the roadblocks placed by the police around government buildings negatively impacted the lives of both pedestrians and residents downtown.

While filming, we were in front of Tahrir Square, the birthplace of the Egyptian revolution. A Yemeni colleague was taking photos with his mobile phone of the place that means a lot for a Yemeni who demonstrated in Sanaa’s Change Square to topple a dictatorship.

As he was taking pictures, a teenager snatched the iPhone 4 from my colleague’s hand and walked away confidently. The Yemeni followed him and tried to stop him. To his surprise, the boy turned back with a knife in his hand and threatened that he will stab my colleague if he continues to ask for the phone.

We were nine guys and three women. We thought that we could help him if we all go out of the minibus and frighten the boy, but the boy went wild and started to scream.

A few seconds later, more than 20 of his peers came with knives and sticks and were about to attack us. An older guy riding a motorbike came and the boy jumped behind the biker and they sped off. No one even tried to stop and watch what was going on. At this very moment, our fear made us get into the minibus and drive away.

This was a turning point for me. After watching this, only one thing was on my mind, how could I live here? It's not the incident itself that made me change my mind to move to Egypt, but rather the passersby who were watching us being attacked and blackmailed by thugs at daytime. While Egyptians are known for being helpful, the spike in criminal activity has made many reluctant to intervene as they would have before the revolution.

Tahrir Square is one of the most crowded squares, if not the most, in Egypt. To have your cellphone stolen at daytime and in front of hundreds of watchers, one needs to think 100 times before deciding to settle in Egypt, but thank God, I only thought once and decided not endanger the lives of family in country that almost has no safety.

It's not that I've given up on Egypt forever. My love of Egypt is endless and priceless. It's my birthplace and the country that embraced me for 14 years, the country that granted me citizenship.

But I feel so sad that Egypt is no longer safe. Once this country was the safest place in the world with millions of foreign tourists spending their most beautiful times under its warm loving sun or enjoying its golden beaches.

The problem is that after the revolution the prisons were emptied. There now seem to be more criminals than policemen on the streets. I have heard true stories of rape, kidnapping, murder, and many crimes.

One more thing that has frightened me about the new Egypt: extremism. Islamic extremism is growing rapidly in Egypt, this has been notable after the revolution, and more clear after the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi took office a year ago today.

Gaza is ruled by an Islamic party, but there is no extremism. Gaza is blockaded and frequently attacked by Israel, but the crime level is very low and internal security is near to excellent.

From my heart, I hope that Egypt will be safe like Gaza soon.

Ahmed Aldabba is a correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor in Gaza City, Gaza.

call me John Edwrds but I think there really might be 2 Americas..............

Trayvon Martin case: How Rachel Jeantel went from star witness to 'train wreck'

Nineteen-year-old Rachel Jeantel holds some of the most critical information about the Trayvon Martin murder case. Yet her delivery on the stand in Seminole County this week drew widespread criticism.

She was hard to understand, mumbled, acted impertinent, annoyed, rude, and came across, as one cable TV news host said, as a “train wreck.”

But the torrent of negative reaction across bar stools and Twitter became more telling than Ms. Jeantel’s simple testimony relating what she heard on the phone as she talked to Mr. Martin before the sound of a “thud” on wet grass and a disconnected line. Moments later, Martin, an unarmed black youth, was dead from a single bullet from a 9mm Kel-Tec pistol registered to George Zimmerman.

While some have rushed to defend Jeantel’s multi-lingual background, others leaned hard into her personally, letting fly on social media a swirl of epithets that roughly amounted to dismissal of her as “ghetto trash,” as one commenter said. That reaction has steered the trial into a new phase, reflecting, some commentators argue, more on America’s privileged classes, including blacks, than Jeantel’s trustworthiness as a star witness.

Reaction to Rachel Jeantel on the stand “has been in terms of aesthetics, of disregarding a witness on the basis of how she talks, how good she is at reading and writing,” says George Ciccariello-Maher, a history and politics professor at Drexel University, in Philadelphia. “These are subtle things that echo literacy testing at the polls, echo the question of whether black Americans can testify against white people, of being always suspect in their testimony. It’s the same old dynamics emerging in a very different guise.”

To be sure, in the scathing commentary about what some called her puzzling demeanor and alleged lack of education was lost her singular background and her youth: A black and Creole girl growing up in a segregated Miami community, she represented part of the problem of the case – an America so divided, that many can’t “code-switch,” or move between the gauzy racial, cultural, and socioeconomic divides that have become hardened with the nation’s first black president, and which have helped fuel political polarization.

“What so much of this really revealed was the gulf between middle-age, middle-class, mainstream codes of behavior and life among youth from poorer, nonwhite neighborhoods … they couldn’t have been further apart if Jeantel were born on the moon,” writes Eric Deggans in the Tampa Bay Times.

But that divide epitomizes the trial itself, Mr. Deggans argues: “As each side on this murder trial tries to prove the other person had tendencies toward prejudice and violence that may have sparked the fight, how will jurors [five white women and one Hispanic woman] judge the difference between edgy culture and outright dysfunction?”

Jeantel spent nearly seven hours on the stand over two days, relating some of the most riveting bits of information about the night Martin died, crucial to the case. While others have said they saw Martin beat Zimmerman, that came only after Jeantel said she heard a heavy-breathing man, allegedly Zimmerman, say to Martin, “What are you doing around here?” and after Martin told her that a “creepy-ass cracker” was following him.

The state alleges that Zimmerman profiled Trayvon, who was returning to his father’s home with a bag of Skittles candy, a can of iced tea, and $40 in his pocket.

The state says Zimmerman chased and confronted Martin, and then fired at Martin only after he realized he was losing the ensuing fight. Zimmerman says he fired in self-defense after Martin doubled back and attacked him, breaking his nose and bashing his head on the sidewalk.

The killing became a national story after Sanford police refused to charge Zimmerman with any crime, saying they had no evidence to counter his self-defense claim. Forty-four days later a Seminole County grand jury indicted Zimmerman on second degree murder charges. If convicted, Zimmerman, an aspiring police officer who served as a neighborhood watch captain, could spend the rest of his life in Florida state prison.

The big question hanging over the trial is whether it was an unarmed Martin who claimed his self-defense rights against an armed adult stranger following him in the dark, and whether Zimmerman waived his self-defense rights when he made the decision to pursue Trayvon after noting to a 911 dispatcher that “these [guys] always get away.”

Yet the potential for Jeantel’s testimony to illuminate that central question appeared to sink beneath a wave of commentary about aesthetics, as Christina Coleman summarizes in a Global Grind article called “Why Black People Understand Rachel Jeantel.”

“I … understand why white people wouldn’t like Rachel … But maybe the reason white people don’t understand Rachel Jeantel has something more to do with white privilege than what they could call Jeantel’s capricious nature,” she wrote.

But Ms. Coleman’s contention that jurors should accept that blacks and whites often live in different worlds rather than as equal members of a polyglot American society is a problematic explanation, writes J. Christian Adams on the Pajamas Media website.

“Coleman sounds like John C. Calhoun, the South’s leading defender of slavery and segregation,” he writes. “Calhoun believed that blacks and whites could never live together, and that after any emancipation they’d forever be ‘worlds apart.’”

copied from Yahoo News.............

“I have spent my life fighting for the kind of people I grew up with. For two decades, I stood with kids and families against big HMOs and big insurance companies. When I got to the Senate, I fought those same fights against the Washington lobbyists and for causes like the Patients' Bill of Rights. I stand here tonight ready to work with you and John [Kerry] to make America stronger. And we have much work to do, because the truth is, we still live in a country where there are two different Americas... [applause] one, for all of those people who have lived the American dream and don't have to worry, and another for most Americans, everybody else who struggle to make ends meet every single day. It doesn't have to be that way...